A Website Dedicated to Northrop Frye

Apple

I’ve been reading a book about computers, full of very muddled arguments about whether a machine can be said to think or have intelligence. The difference between a mechanism and an organism is not one of intelligence but of will. An automobile can run faster than a human being can, but in itself has no will to do so: it will sit rusting in a garage indefinitely without the slightest sign of impatience. There’s no reason why man should not develop machines that can reproduce every activity of the human brain on a vastly higher level of speed and efficiency. But nobody has yet come up with a computer that wanted to do these things on its own: as will, so far, every machine is an expression of the will of its makers. In the Clarke-Kubrick movie 2001, the computer Hal suddenly develops an autonomous will, a power of using its intelligence for its own ends. That makes Hal a nightmare, of course, but it also makes him a fellow-creature: he’s now a he and not an it, and the depiction of his gradual destruction had a genuine pathos. (CW 6, 682)